David M. Shribman: The long and winding road of conservatism

WARREN ― It's been four years, an eternity in American political history, since I last drove along a backwoods byway from here to Lebanon, New Hampshire, and contemplated what that route told me about the destination of American conservatism.

That was in the middle of Joe Biden's term in the White House. A House committee was examining whether Donald Trump was responsible for the insurrection on Capitol Hill on Jan. 6, 2021. The Supreme Court was polishing its ruling overturning the Roe v. Wade abortion-rights decision, which was about a week in the future. The Senate was about to pass the first bipartisan gun restrictions in decades. It seems so long ago.

In an age long past, the ultimate direction of the road that led from the home of Meldrim Thomson Jr., who as governor of the Granite State from 1973 to 1979 warned conservatives about "those who wish to completely socialize America," to the home of Sen. Norris Cotton, who for two decades from 1954 described himself as "rock-ribbed conservative and proud of it," was unknown.

The question of its destination more than ever is at the heart of our national passage.

The question preoccupying me four years ago seemed more vital than ever as once again I was driving along the grandly named Gov. Meldrim Thomson Scenic Highway to the political base of Cotton. That's because conservatives, in an aspect of their creed at odds with its general predilection against change, seem to be engaged in an important debate and undergoing a fundamental transition.

That debate four years ago seems even more vital today along the route that begins in the very forest where Gov. Sherman Adams (1949-1953) became a modest lumber baron decades before becoming Dwight Eisenhower's White House chief of staff. Adams' downfall, in 1958, came over his acceptance of a vicuna coat and Oriental rug from a shady Boston businessman ― arguably a trifling personal benefit in comparison with the enrichment the Trump family has enjoyed.

I lived in New Hampshire during the years of both Thomson and Cotton, and later visited with the former governor ― who had moved from curmudgeonly to almost (but not quite) cuddly ― on Mount Cube, where, in soiled, faded blue jeans and an old olive work shirt, he poured his own sweet maple syrup over pancakes his wife served.

Thomson was fierce and his rhetoric had a bite, but it was a 1970s version of bile, issued quietly, almost whispery, and the imprecations he issued ― and his effort (beat this, Pete Hesgeth) to order flags at half-staff on Good Friday to mark the death of Jesus Christ ― seem mild, even madcap, compared to the daily fare of Truth Social, where the phrases "radical left lunatic," and "stupid," and "low-IQ" hardly register now. They've been rendered attacks that rarely attract attention anymore.

Today Donald Trump is the face of conservatism, with a tone and timbre that couldn't be more different than one personified by President Calvin Coolidge (who hardly spoke, and never spoke ill of anyone); Sen. Robert Taft ("while I have no difficulty talking, I don't know how to do any of the eloquence business which makes for enthusiasm or applause"); Sen. Bob Dole (who repressed his early mean-spirited instinct and became known as one of the gentlemen of politics ― and perhaps the funniest); and President George H.W. Bush (who never said a mean thing to, or about, anyone).

Their conservatism, and that of President Richard Nixon, was generally respectful of political norms and American institutions. The conservatism of today respects neither. Nixon, Bush and Dole might be accused of being too accepting of a status quo that was shaped by the liberal impulses of the New Deal; Trump has targeted for opprobrium figures like that. But, in a sense, their views were conservative in that they didn't seek to repeal precedence and didn't comprise an assault on the prevailing ethos of the time.

Trump has captured the conservative movement, or at least the Republican Party that since 1920 has been the vanguard of conservatism, even if it's possible to argue that the president is less a conservative than a radical.

He surely does not share the respect ― actually, the reverence ― for the past that the early philosopher of conservatism, Edmund Burke, proclaimed at the end of the 18th century. Trump is, if anything, ahistorical, though he surely is a significant part of modern American political history. He will tell you so.

Back on Mount Cube all those years ago ― where Thomson produced 600 gallons of rich maple syrup annually and one year sold 1,400 dozen ears of sweet corn, along with raspberries, tomatoes, broccoli, lettuce and onions, from his farm stand ― the onetime three-term governor talked about his anti-tax philosophy that Ronald Reagan later promoted and that may be, along with disdain for the United States, the principal strand of the old conservatism that Trump embraces.

Otherwise, the Trump ethos has veered sharply rightward from the old conservatism. Communism is gone, so the anti-Red fervor Thomson and Cotton expressed is a dead letter today, despite the Republicans' recent offensive to paint the Democrats with that smear.

Both, however, would share Trump's protectionist instincts. Cotton, no free-trader, was fiercely protective of New Hampshire's textile industry and supported tariffs to protect the mills that, in his time and in mine, sat on the Merrimack River in Manchester and in small towns scattered among the hills of the state. That's a break from the free-trade orthodoxy that's been part of conservatism in modern decades and is at the heart of the ideology still promoted by many conservatives and is worshiped on The Wall Street Journal editorial board.

But the swagger on the domestic front and at international meetings may be a signature Trump diversion.

The old conservatism was about manners as much as about ideas. Politeness: prized. Boasting: condemned. Public swearing: verboten. Restraint: celebrated. Discretion: venerated. Showboating and grandstanding: forbidden. Gaudiness: decried. Verbal cruelty: not tolerated. Multiple marriages (Trump has had three): deplored. (Thomson was married for 63 years; Cotton was married for 51 years until his first wife's death, then married again for an additional nine.)

The road that goes from the home of Meldrim Thomson to that of Norris Cotton is an especially winding one. And the ultimate destination of its political road? That's perhaps the greatest unknown in American life.

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David M. Shribman is the former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.